Turkey skirting Iran sanctions by trading gold for crude

Turkey has exchanged nearly 60 tons of gold for several million tons of Iranian crude oil, despite its promises to uphold Western sanctions on Iran’s energy sector, according to recent Turkish reports.

By using gold instead of money, Turkey is able to skirt Western sanctions on Iran’s oil trade, particularly those pertaining to SWIFT, the global money transfer service that until recently assisted the Central Bank of Iran and other Iranian financial institutions.

The exchanges raise questions about the Obama administration’s decision to grant Turkey a temporary waiver exempting it from U.S. sanctions to Iran, according to foreign policy experts and those on Capitol Hill who speculated that the revelation could spur Congress to pass a new round of Iran sanctions to prevent such trades.

“The idea that Turkey needs a waiver for more time to disconnect itself from the Iran oil trade is ludicrous,” said Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon adviser on Iran and Iraq. “Turkey is playing Obama for a fool.”

This admin is a sham and Obama is endangering us by looking the other way while Iran beats the sanctions and our fake ally Turkey bathes Iran in gold.
That moves us closer to WWIII. Time for Obama to GO back to Chicago for good.

Iran’s Central Bank says the country’s annual inflation rate hit 24.9 percent in October compared to 24.0 the previous month. The figure, reported by the official IRNA news agency Wednesday, was one of the highest inflation rates since President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to office seven years ago.

They add to a bleak economic picture which conservatives are pinning on Ahmadinejad, who they supported in his disputed 2009 re-election.

Iran’s national currency, the rial, lost about 50 percent of its foreign exchange value in less than a week in October, hitting an all-time low of 35,500 versus the dollar. It currently stands at about 32,000, and was close to 10,000 in early 2011. The decline has been blamed on a combination of government mismanagement and sanctions imposed over Iran’s nuclear program.

Israel defense minister says Iran has slowed down uranium enrichment push by some 8 months2012/11/09 – Israel's defense minister said Iran has slowed the timetable for enriching enough uranium to build nuclear weapons, implying that Israel would have more time to decide whether to strike Iran's enrichment facilities.

Ehud Barak's assertion that Iran has "essentially delayed their arrival at the red line by eight months," is in line with the timeframe laid out by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in September, when he spoke at the U.N. General Assembly. There, Netanyahu said the world has until next summer at the latest to stop Iran before it can build a nuclear bomb. The West suspects Iran may be aiming toward production of nuclear weapons and has imposed a series of sanctions on the regime.

U.S. lawmakers are currently working on a set of new sanctions that could prevent Iran from doing business with most of the world until it agrees to internationally demanded constraints on its nuclear program. Iran denies it is trying to build a bomb, insisting its program is for peaceful purposes. However, it has restricted access of U.N. inspectors to the country's nuclear sites.

Officials from the U.N. nuclear watchdog — the International Atomic Energy Agency — said Friday they would meet with Iranian officials in Tehran next month in an attempt to restart stalled nuclear talks. It would be the first such meeting since early summer, when talks halted over Iran's reluctance to allow IAEA into sites the agency suspects could have been used in secret work on nuclear weapons.

Israel sees Iran's nuclear program as an existential threat, citing Iranian denials of the Holocaust, its calls for Israel's destruction, its development of missiles capable of striking the Jewish state and its support for anti-Israel militant groups. Barak's comments, made during an interview late Thursday on Israel's Channel 2 TV, appeared to be based on an August report by the IAEA. The report said that Iran has converted much of its higher-level enriched uranium into a powder for a medical research reactor that is difficult to reprocess for weapons production.